Tumbling on success: How Tumblr's David Karp built a £500 million empire

This article was taken from the March 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

On the evening of August 23, 2011, Chris, a New Yorker who wishes his surname to be withheld, created a Tumblr account. His aim was to raise awareness of the Occupy Wall Street march planned for September 17. The idea was simple: he asked users to submit a photograph of themselves holding a sign explaining their economic circumstances. He called the page We Are The 99 Per Cent, and promptly forgot about it.

Four days later, Chris returned to his flat, after spending time preparing meals for protesters, and checked the We Are The 99 Per Cent tumblelog. When he had left, there had been two photos in the inbox. "I thought, I'll have five or six more submissions," says Chris, now 29. "The inbox was overflowing. I spent that night reading through the submissions. By the time I was done, I had barely dented this thing."

Advertisement

One photo was from Priscilla Grim, a 36-year-old activist working on strategic communications for the Occupy Wall Street movement who has been "protesting one way or another for about 20 years". Grim noticed that, two weeks after submitting her image, the blog hadn't been updated, so she emailed Chris and offered to help to edit the blog: "It struck me that this was the perfect organising tool of today," she says. Together, they started posting the submissions. Some were short: "I served in the US Army. Served 16 months in Iraq. Now I deliver pizza. I am the 99%." Others were longer, from the jobless woman prevented from donating a kidney to her friend because she didn't have health insurance, to the 19-year-old single mother who said she went without food for days to buy formula milk for her four-month-old son. But they all kept the same format, with signs often obscuring the creators' faces. "We posted 100 photos before it went big," says Grim. The New York Times covered the blog. "After that, it went all over the place."

The blog became a meme and the meme went viral. As Wired went to press, 3,000 photos had been posted; the tumblelog receives more than 100 submissions a day. Protestors adopted "We Are The 99 Per Cent" as a slogan, writing it on signs and banners. "We're standing there with thousands of people screaming [the phrase]," Grim says.

Read next

Here's how the Xbox Adaptive Controller is getting people with disabilities back into gaming

ByStephen Armstrong

It had been Chris's first time using Tumblr. "My understanding was that it was an image-sharing platform," he says. "I was vaguely aware that it was hipsterish."

***

Advertisement

Karp at Tumblr HQ, an open-plan office, with exposed brickwork, over two floors of a Flatiron district building

Tumblr launched in February 2007, with the tagline "Blogging made easy". Its first accounts specialised in art, media and porn (14 of the top 20 search keywords containing the word "tumblr" are still associated with adult blogs, according to SEOBook.com).

Around 42 per cent of all original posts are photos.

Read next

Xbox Scarlett is the big gamble that game streaming tech needs

ByMatt Kamen

But Tumblr is growing up, fast: the site expanded its user base by 900 per cent in the year to June 2011. In 2010, it served under two billion monthly page views; now, it generates about 14 billion, more than Wikipedia or Twitter. Its 36 million users so far have created 42 million posts each day -- 13.5 billion in total. According to Nielsen, it was the UK's second most popular social network or blog in the third quarter of 2011, with 229.6 million page views, trailing only Facebook. In September 2011, the company raised $85 million (£55m) from investors -- a round that valued Tumblr at $800 million (£500m).

Advertisement

If Facebook is the social network for online identification and authentication, and Twitter is for communication, Tumblr fulfils a different role: self-expression. Users can upload seven types of media -- text, photos, quotes, links, dialogue, audio, video -- from one button on their dashboard and push it to their public-facing tumblelog. These blogs can be designed however a user wants, or dressed in a "theme" (the most popular theme, Redux, has three million users). Tumblr is extremely easy to use as a free-form blogging platform, but has also developed into its own social network. Users follow other tumblelogs, whose content appears in their dashboards, not unlike Facebook's newsfeed; hitting the "reblog" button publishes that post to their own blogs, a feature Tumblr put out two years before Twitter introduced its own retweet button. "The social network that emerges out of Tumblr is interesting because it's driven by content, not by the social graph that these other networks are building around," says John Maloney, the company's president. And that content spreads quickly: on average, a Tumblr post gets reblogged nine times.

As Tumblr matures, it's attracting powerful fans. In October 2011, President Obama launched his 2012 re-election campaign on Tumblr, encouraging user submissions as a part of a "huge collaborative storytelling effort". Six months earlier, the US State Department launched the "official US Department of State presence on Tumblr", with video posts and article links. Major media outlets such as Newsweek, the New York Times and the BBC have tumblrs, along with fashion brands such as Alexander McQueen and Oscar de la Renta. Tech is represented by high profile companies including IBM and Olympus.

David Karp was 19 when he founded Tumblr -- "still a dippy, nerdy kid," as he puts it. The New Yorker learned to code for the web at 11, was home-schooled from 15 and lived in Japan by himself for a year at 18. He's now 25 and has grown up with the site. "I was always self-conscious about my age," he says. "I still don't have that much faith in me." But his goal is ambitious: Karp sees Tumblr not as a network, but as a product he's designing. "We're striving towards perfection," he says. "We're trying to build the iPod."

Karp didn't invent "tumblelogging", the rapid-fire short-form blogging popularised by Tumblr. The tumblelog widely acknowledged as launching the trend was anarchaia.org, created by Christian Neukirchen, a 17-year-old high-schooler in Biberach an der Riss in south Germany, on March 27, 2005. Neukirchen described anarchaia as "experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)". Obstsalat is the German for fruit salad, and Neukirchen's first post was the same raw mix, featuring Pearl Jam lyrics, four links to other web pages and a pencilled sketch. The only rule was that editorial content be less than a paragraph. A user called "_why" on Redhanded.com, a now defunct site dedicated to discussion of web programming language Ruby on Rails, coined the term "tumblelog", a conflation of "tumble" and "web-logging", to describe Neukirchen's site.

Read next

Microsoft's E3 2018 conference shows that Xbox is (sort of) back

ByMatt Kamen

Other tumblelogs soon emerged, featuring links, quotes, screenshots, in an internet-enabled stream of consciousness. "It was kind of a return to the old approach to blogging," says Karp. "Everybody had this page you could just dump stuff on. And it was so much more beautiful than blogs at the time." "Tumblr started as something I wanted to use myself," says Karp on the November morning that Wired meets him. He is tall, stick-skinny, with metallic blue eyes and a shock of dark brown hair, and wears a checked shirt under an expensive-looking grey hoodie. Breakfasting on middle-Eastern eggs and an iced mint tea in his favourite café, a Moroccan place close to his Greenwich Village home, he speaks about four times faster than anyone else.

In 2006, Karp "desperately" wanted to publish his thoughts on his own blog. He had a problem, though: "I'm not a writer. I can't write. I don't enjoy it like [prolific bloggers] John Gruber or Jason Calacanis do. But I do have things to share." He tried blogging services such as WordPress and Movable Type, and even stuck with Blogger for about three months, but "that big empty text box" always gave him pause.

The first tumbleloggers had hacked together their own sites. "I said, alright, I'm going to hack my own tool," remembers Karp.

Abandoning the text box, he decided to have a button for each type of media -- text, photo, link, audio and video. The button would expose the specific forms to upload content used by dedicated sharing sites, such as YouTube, Flickr and Delicious. "The thought was, we'll use their forms and expose that particular form whenever you want it."

At the time, Karp was running his own consultancy, Davidville, which built business websites, along with a 24-year-old programmer called Marco Arment, who would later found Instapaper. The pair had a steady stream of work, but often infuriated their clients with their lackadaisical approach to admin. "Operational experience, making appointments, returning emails, things like that: I sucked at it," says Karp. "They loved what we did, but hated working with us." At the end of 2006, Karp and Arment had a two-week break between contracts. Karp told Arment, "I've got enough of a vision of this thing. Let's see what we can put together in the two weeks before our next gig."

Read next

The inside story of Microsoft's surprising Gears of War 5 reveal

ByMatt Kamen

The pair coded a crude version of Tumblr -- it was in private Beta in October 2006, and was released as a free tumblelogging platform in early 2007. Within the first two weeks, 75,000 users created blogs. "The one really cool thing was we could let you change anything about its theme," says Karp. "It was just a big chunk of code you could rip apart and make original. And it attracted this spectacular community of designers and hackers. Over the next few weeks, they built gorgeous things on Tumblr that didn't look like anything else on the internet. That still defines Tumblr to this day."

People signed up to Tumblr to express themselves. Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research who studies social networks, says: "I saw people who were frustrated with Facebook at not being able to express themselves. Tumblr became a powerful complement to Facebook. It didn't require the heavy-handed 'we must be friends' that is so ingrained in Facebook."

By March, Tumblr users were making 10,000 posts each hour. Karp and Arment continued consulting. The site cost about $5,000 a month to run, so they began speaking to a few angel investors and venture capitalists. In October 2007, they sold 25 per cent of the company to Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, and betaworks head John Borthwick and Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick, for $750,000, valuing the fledgling company at $3 million.

Karp realised that "we had a network of cool blogs" -- online art galleries such as Eat Sleep Draw and meta webcomics such as Garfield Minus Garfield. But it was difficult to discover new tumblelogs. Users started self-organising: they would write posts, asking for others' Tumblr addresses, then post a complete list of these accounts to their own tumblr. "They were hacking the network," says Karp. "Even though they had no tools at all, they were finding each other and drawing these lines between each other." Users were connecting with one another, drawing lines on a social graph based around their interests: out of the images and pithy quotes, a network was emerging.

Karp added directories, which grouped blogs by the tags they assigned themselves, and he allowed those not signed up to browse Tumblr sites. He also created the Radar -- interesting blogs selected by Karp and Arment. The two were keeping up using their RSS readers. "We realised, man, RSS sucks for Tumblr," says Karp, "because RSS was designed for hokey old traditional blogs." The dashboard, where users edited their posts, was a possible solution. "All the stuff I wanted to blog was on my dashboard," says Karp. A reblog button, introduced in May 2007, supercharged Tumblr's growth. "The reblog button mechanised viral stars on Tumblr," says Karp.

Read next

Sea of Thieves is Rare’s riskiest voyage yet, but it’s a huge success

ByMatt Kamen

Communities of users began to coalesce around topics such as cycling and technology, following and reblogging one another. "If you think of Facebook as being a strict friends' network, Tumblr is a strong interest network," says Boyd. "On Facebook, it's a DNS [domain name system] for people. Tumblr is a place to share and communicate." Charlie O'Donnell, a New York-based venture capitalist, says that Tumblr has now gone beyond being just a publishing tool. "What's really exciting is the interconnectedness, the community. It makes blogging in other places kind of lonely."

Tumblr continued to raise money, landing two more rounds totalling $9.5 million, from original investors Union Square and Spark, as it hit seven million blogs in January 2010. That November, Silicon Valley came knocking -- "way too late," says Karp. "They were not paying attention because we were out here [in New York]." Karp flew out to California and came back with $30 million from Sequoia Capital, which has funded Apple, Google, YouTube, PayPal, Yahoo and LinkedIn. "I stepped back thinking the stakes are pretty high," says Karp. "Part of being a [then] $100 million company is really taking things seriously."

Tumblr founder David Karp used to ride a Vespa to the offcie, but has since upgraded to a Triumph Bonneville

Taking things seriously meant hiring more people, Karp thought: Tumblr had about 14 staff at the time. But then he spoke to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. "Mark talked me down from that. He said,'Well, when YouTube was acquired for $1.6 billion, they had 16 employees. So don't give up on being clever.' He reminded me you could make it pretty far on smarts."

Barely a year later, though, in summer 2011, Tumblr went back to the Valley for more money, as it struggled to deal with a massive surge of users. It raised $85 million, valuing the company now at $800 million. John Maloney says there were bigger valuations on the table, which Tumblr declined for the chance to work with John Lilly, ex-CEO of Mozilla and a partner at Greylock. It was an obvious investment for Greylock, according to Lilly: "We learned that in addition to the ubiquity of Tumblr today," he wrote at the time, "the engagement of users, posters and rebloggers is off the charts. Good content gets surfaced and spread more quickly than any other network I've ever encountered." Around 70 per cent of all Tumblr's traffic comes from inside the network, from users looking at others' posts.

Read next

Microsoft expands Xbox One Game Pass with day one launch titles

ByMatt Kamen

As the round was closing, and Karp was about to board a plane back to New York, he checked his iPhone one last time before the cabin doors closed. There was an email from Richard Branson, whom Karp had met briefly at a conference in Richmond, Virginia, a few weeks earlier. The message wasn't long: "A couple of things; somebody mentioned that you might be keen to become an astronaut,"

Branson wrote. "If that was the case, let me know and I'll put you in touch with David Clark at Virgin Galactic who handles these things for us. If you're ever interested in a partner in Tumblr if you could put me on the long list of people who I'm sure are interested in investing [sic]. And finally if you're ever in the Caribbean I would love to welcome you and Rachel [Karp's girlfriend] to Necker."

The funding was wrapped up in four days and Branson went on to become an investor in Tumblr. A few weeks later, Karp was invited to the White House to advise President Obama's social-media team. "You know what," Karp told a friend. "I think I'm going to let this go to my head now."

The thing about David, he's a 25-year-old, but he's not a 25-year-old," says Maloney. "He's been building stuff on his own for a very long time. He's a unique case study."

Karp spent his teenage years acting like an adult, perhaps because his ambitions weren't the same as most high-schoolers': "I was enamoured of these things like Oracle and Mercury, big software conglomerates. I thought that I wanted to make software, be like those guys." He had grown up on the Upper West Side, a smart Manhattan neighbourhood, and taught himself to code HTML at 11, spending a summer working through HTML For Dummies. In his spare time, he worked at Tekserve, an Apple repair specialist. "All I aspired to be was one of the guys that wears a cool anti-static bracelet and gets to take apart computers all day long," he says.

Read next

Xbox One X review: Great hardware, but where are the games?

7/10

ByMark Walton

He briefly attended The Bronx High School of Science, a non-fee-paying school whose alumni include seven Nobel prize-winning physicists and six Pulitzer winners. It was not, Karp says, "a particularly driven environment".

Fred Seibert, a friend of Karp's mother, recalls that "David was not having the best time in the world at high school." Karp's parents let him drop out at 15 to be home-schooled, and he started working for Seibert at his production company, Frederator Studios, responsible for The Powerpuff Girls on Cartoon Network. "[Karp] was very short, and he was starting to learn how to shave," remembers Seibert, who became one of Tumblr's original investors. "He couldn't quite look you in the eye, he was very quiet. But he had amazing ideas." "I loved it," says Karp, "I switched from wearing whatever awful clothes I was wearing to what the twentysomethings were wearing in the office -- collared shirts and rolled-up sleeves. I got to act like an adult and I got a kick out of that."

Karp's next job was at Urban Baby, an internet forum for discussing urban motherhood. John Maloney, who founded Urban Baby with his wife in 1999, remembers Karp as a "gangly, shy kid. I gave him the specs for a minisite and hours later it came back, beautiful and with functionality I didn't think about. I was like, this kid is 16? I realised he was a gifted product guy. So I fell in love with him and made him my head of product at 16. I let him go nuts with it and inject new features."

***

Urban Baby "gave me a real taste for building products that communities use," says Karp. In 2006, CNET acquired the site for an undisclosed amount and Karp, then chief technology officer, earned some capital from the buy-out. He used it to set up his first company, Davidville.

Read next

Xbox One X vs PS4 Pro: 4K gaming jargon explained

ByAndrew Williams

When Tumblr took off, Karp became a New York celebrity. He made the most of it. "He was a busy dater," says Maloney. "A very busy dater." Karp went out with a CNET reporter, and gossip sites such as Gawker ran snarky stories about the "enfant terrible". The New York Observer and Maxim published profiles; New York magazine put him on the cover; one long article in Details, "The Playboys of Tech", described Karp as a "fameballer" (someone who seeks celebrity).

While Karp played the tech man about town, Tumblr faced problems. In June 2010, the site went down for nearly a whole weekend. One user, William Tildesly, emailed Tumblr to complain.

Karp replied, cc'ing his whole team: "we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to discourage our entire team... Please go away." "This guy was a complete asshole," says Karp now. Nor does he regret his fameballing days. "I got such a kick out of it. I thought it was funny. Not having had the opportunity to game the social system in high school and college, this was a chance to dick around... It was a chance to see how high I could climb in the ranks of this stupid little social system [of New York media]. "I don't see why, if actors can get some attention, the people who are building these wildly successful products can't -- it's not that I necessarily put myself in that camp," he hurriedly adds.

Still, those around him were concerned. "It was scary," says Seibert. "I was worried. David was not a particularly social animal. And all of a sudden there were people around him who wanted to go and get drunk with him, girls who wanted to go and get with him." Maloney says: "I was the idea of adult supervision" for Karp (in the Tumblr offices, Maloney's face is on a poster in the bathroom exhorting employees to wash their hands). "I tried to slow it down." Seibert took Karp aside and told him: "You should cut that shit out."

Karp did. These days, he gets into the office about 9.30am and leaves at 6pm. He has a steady girlfriend, Rachel Eakley, a graduate student in psychology, and they share a French bulldog called Clark. "I got away from that world," says Karp. "It was fun for a year and then I was bored." Karp still posts his life to his Tumblr account, and last year he modelled for Uniqlo on posters put up all over the New York subway. Maloney is relieved: "He's much more settled down now. Thank God those days are behind us."

Read next

Forza Motorsport 7 and the cold, hard nature of gaming beauty

ByJohn Robertson

Tumblr now employs around 60 people. Many of the new hires are focused on turning it into a profitable business. Mark Coatney, a former Newsweek journalist, advises businesses on how to use Tumblr. He describes the platform as a "content-sharing network" which companies can use to build a new, younger audience. "It's about making users feel like they have a real connection." "Tumblr lends itself to the variety of content we have to share," says Jonathan Akeroyd, CEO and president of Alexander McQueen, which in November 2010 launched a tumblr (m-c-q.com) based around its new contemporary line, McQ. "Because Tumblr is so image-focused, it has been a great tool in building McQ's visual identity. It's also really great to see the reaction of Tumblr bloggers when we 'like' their McQ related posts -- we'll find them taking screenshots of it and reblogging or sharing their excitement." McQ has the highest average number of notes among luxury fashion brands -- with an average of 520 per post.

Karp isn't worried about revenues just yet. "I'm all for turning this into a big successful business," he says. "I believe Tumblr can not just be profitable, but wildly profitable." Karp's strategy is two-pronged: blog promotion and an App Store-like marketplace.

Tumblr has experimented with the first, charging individual users, as well as corporates, to push themselves up the directory. "There are no current platforms for creators to promote themselves," says Karp. There aren't those platforms for driving attention to creative works and media." Tumblr is working on ways to let artists or fans, including the 5.4 million UK residents who visit Tumblr each month, promote their events and products - to sell tickets for a gig, say. Karp expects these features to be live by the end of the year and to make money in 2013.

The app-store ecosystem is already bringing in some cash. Users can buy premium designs for blogs, costing up to $49, and, like Apple, Tumblr takes a cut (40 per cent for less expensive themes, 20 per cent for those at $49). It's worth "millions of dollars a year" and enough to cover a small proportion of Tumblr's operating costs, according to Maloney. Karp says some of the theme designers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars. "Right now, it's limited to blog fashion -- how it looks," says Karp. "There is no reason why it can't extend to blog function, where we let developers introduce new functionality." Tumblr would pay to introduce features such as commerce buttons to their page. "I think of that as the last feature we ever build -- we introduce the platform and then the developer community takes over."

But can such features justify Tumblr's $800m valuation? "Will they have a cashflow that justifies that number, or will someone buy it for that amount?" Charlie O'Donnell asks. "For a big acquirer looking to get more social, I'm not sure how they would integrate it in a way that makes it more than the sum of its parts."

Read next

The inside story of the Xbox One X

ByJames Temperton

Tumblr also faces other challenges, notably content rights and pornography. Karp is sanguine. "Porn used to be about ten per cent of all our traffic, now it's around three to five per cent," he says. "I'm not into moderating this stuff. Tumblr's an excellent platform for porn, which I don't personally have any moral opposition to."

As Karp sees it, disparate threads such as porn, The 99 Per Cent blog and the corporate accounts can coexist on his platform: he wants to enable creators whatever their field or interest. "For virality, Tumblr is a place for ideas, for media, for discussions of whatever sort to happen. "I want it to be perfect at what it does. And to be current with the current generation of technology, and progress as the technology progresses. That's a very different vision to Facebook's, which is a constantly evolving platform where they're piling all their new functionality on it." Tumblr has fewer features than a year ago, something that makes Karp pround. "We're going to turn it into a product-orientated company more akin to an Apple or a Google." Karp's emulation of Apple is half vision, half insurance. "I have a hypothesis that none of these social-network companies lasts more than ten years. If that's the case, I want to be the one building those networks, rather than waiting for the next Facebook and Tumblr to come along."

Chris and Grim continue to edit The 99 Per Cent blog, and Chris is planning to launch a new tumblr featuring artworks inspired by the submissions. "Tumblr is a great platform," says Grim. "But I can't wait to see the next thing that gets invented."

Tumblr tales

The artistEat Sleep Draw receives 800-1,000 submissions a week and publishes a picture every hour, 24 hours a day -- that's more than 35,000 pieces to date. It has 160,000 followers and gets 500,000 page views a month. "It's pretty wicked considering I'm not paying for hosting," says 26-year-old Lee. Despite high traffic, Eat Sleep Draw currently makes only "a couple of hundred bucks a month" from ads and by selling custom-made sketchbooks. However, Lee is confident that he can turn his tumblr into a sustainable business.

Advertisement

The porn star... Jessie Andrews created her Tumblr [NSFW] for one reason: "You can post nude pictures without them getting deleted," she says. The 19-year-old, from Miami, has appeared in more than 50 adult movies, and says Tumblr helps her connect with fans. "It doesn't help me get work, but photographers and directors sometimes get their eye caught on my page and ask questions," says Andrews.

And the president

Barack Obama's 2008 US election campaign made good use of Twitter and Facebook. For the 2012 election, the US president's staff added Tumblr, "because of its submission feature". The (unnamed) campaign staff running it encourage users to upload photos and jokes. In its first six weeks, the site has published more than 60 posts, including behind-the-scenes photos and videos from the campaign, posters and infographics.

This article was first published in the March 2012 issue of WIRED magazine